Holder and Obama Differ in Approach to Underlying Issues of Missouri Unrest

President Obama discussed the situation in Ferguson, Mo., with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Aug. 14 in Martha's Vineyard.

Pete Souza / The White House

By PETER BAKER and MATT APUZZO

August 19, 2014

WASHINGTON — The two men in open-collar shirts sat facing each other, papers and a BlackBerry strewn on a coffee table, sober looks on both their faces. One leaned forward, gesturing with his left hand, clearly doing the talking. The other sat back in his chair, two fingers pressed to his temple as he listened intently.

When violence erupted last week after a police shooting in Missouri, President Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. huddled on Martha’s Vineyard where both were on vacation. But as the most powerful African-Americans in the nation confront its enduring racial divide, they come at it from fundamentally different backgrounds and points of view.

Mr. Holder, 63, is the one leaning forward, both in the photograph released by the White House and on the issues underlying the crisis in Ferguson, Mo. A child of the civil rights era, he grew up shaped by the images of violence in Selma, Ala., and joined sit-ins at Columbia University where protesters renamed an office after Malcolm X. Now in high office, he pushes for policy changes and is to fly on Wednesday to Ferguson to personally promise justice in the case of a black teenager who was fatally shot by a white police officer.

Mr. Obama, 53, is the one seemingly holding back in the White House photograph, contemplative, even brooding, as if seeking to understand how events could get so out of hand. He was too young and removed to experience the turmoil of the 1960s, growing up in a multiracial household in Hawaii and Indonesia. As he now seeks balance in an unbalanced time, he wrestles with the ghosts of history that his landmark election, however heady, failed to exorcise.

The differences between the two men have drawn criticism since the death of Michael Brown on Aug. 9, as some African-Americans praise Mr. Holder for his outspokenness and lament or even denounce Mr. Obama for his caution. Michael Eric Dyson, a prominent author and Georgetown University professor, called the president’s public statement on Monday a “stunning epic failure” that seemed to blame black men rather than armed police.

“This is a community aflame with a passion to know the truth, and Obama is treating it dispassionately and with distance,” he said. “There is no blood flowing through the veins with empathy.”

On the other hand, Mr. Dyson said: “Eric feels it in his gut. It rises to his brain. It’s expressed on his tongue.” Mr. Holder, he added, is “an up and down race man who understands the moral consequences of the law on the lives of black people.”

Such sentiments exasperate the White House, which denies any substantive distance between the two. Aides to Mr. Obama said he has been less visceral in his public remarks than his comments after the Trayvon Martin case because there is still an active investigation.

“People shouldn’t presume because the attorney general might be more outspoken on a subject that he’s not consulting with the president and that the president isn’t completely supportive of the steps he’s taking,” said Valerie Jarrett, a senior White House adviser and close friend to both.

Mr. Obama, then heading to the Senate, and Mr. Holder, a former deputy attorney general, met in late 2004 at a Washington dinner party held by Ann Walker Marchant, a public relations executive and niece of Vernon E. Jordan Jr., the Democratic power broker. “They clicked that night and they have been friends ever since,” Ms. Jarrett said.

After Mr. Obama won the presidency in 2008, he made Mr. Holder attorney general in part because of what Ms. Jarrett called “this shared vision” of overhauling the justice system. They have grown so close that they schedule Martha’s Vineyard vacations to coincide. Even closer are their wives, Michelle Obama and Dr. Sharon Malone.

If Mr. Obama gave the impression of wanting to avoid talking about race early in his presidency, Mr. Holder was more direct, such as when the new attorney general declared the United States a “nation of cowards” for not addressing race.

For Mr. Holder, it was personal. His future sister-in-law was one of two black students who enrolled in the University of Alabama with the protection of the National Guard, and Mr. Holder recalled his father telling him how to act if he was wrongly stopped by the police. “I thought of my father’s words years later when, as a college student, I was pulled over twice on the New Jersey Turnpike and my car was searched, even though I was sure I hadn’t been speeding,” he recalled in a speech in April.

“I thought of them again sometime after that,” he added, “when a police officer stopped and questioned me in Washington while I was running to catch a movie, even though I happened to be a federal prosecutor at the time.”

As a young lawyer and prosecutor, Mr. Holder started programs intended to bridge the divide between law enforcement and communities. “We all bring our life experiences to the job we do — and that’s exactly what we want our attorney general to do,” said Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court, a former colleague. “He does care, and it just shows the character of the man himself.”

But his time at the Justice Department has been marked by tension with the White House, where aides thought he was politically maladroit.

Frustrated at times during the first term, Mr. Holder has been empowered in the second to take on more longstanding issues of disparity involving sentencing, racial profiling and voting rights.

And throughout, he has focused on cracking down on police departments that violate civil rights, opening 20 such investigations, more than twice as many in the previous five years. He and aides have discussed opening a similar, broader civil rights investigation into Ferguson’s practices, according to officials.

With his last election behind him, Mr. Obama seems more willing to talk about race. He created an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper this year to focus on black and Latino boys. In a meeting of the program this summer, he related his own experiences and told young black men not to fall into stereotypes.

“The notion that there’s an authentic way of being black — that has to go,” he said. “Because there are a whole bunch of different ways for African-American men to be authentic.” In some ways, it seemed he was pushing back against expectations of how he, as the first African-American president, should prove his own authenticity.

Mr. Holder has been tracking the events in Ferguson since he read the first reports a few hours after Mr. Brown’s shooting. He dashed off an email to aides asking to be briefed by morning and eventually grew angry that, over his objection, the local authorities released surveillance video showing an apparent robbery by Mr. Brown.

Tension peaked Saturday when the F.B.I. was to canvass the neighborhood for witnesses with the local police and Mr. Holder concluded federal investigators would get more cooperation if they were seen as independent. So the F.B.I. did its own survey.

Mr. Holder has repeatedly weighed in on the conduct of the police in Ferguson. But his brother is a retired police lieutenant, and when Mr. Holder read a draft news release, he told aides to change language that he thought was too critical of police.

“He is a friend of law enforcement,” said Reid H. Weingarten, a lawyer and friend noting that Mr. Holder does not see that in conflict with supporting civil rights. “It’s a complicated issue. Both of these things can coexist.”

Mr. Holder considered traveling to Ferguson as early as last Thursday but waited to see if the state authorities could settle down the streets.

After returning from Martha’s Vineyard, he went to the White House on Monday and told Mr. Obama that he planned to go.

Mr. Obama, however, will not, at least not for now. “Some folks want President Obama to be all things to all people — an activist, a marcher, a poet and a race theorist — when his primary job is to govern,” said Joshua DuBois, a former adviser to Mr. Obama. “In Ferguson, he’s governing.”

Correction: August 19, 2014

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated which day Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. returned from Martha’s Vineyard. He returned on Sunday, not Saturday.